OPINION:
Hurricanes are exciting, even if deadly, but not even Katrina was half as exciting as the television coverage of a big blow. The weather is to Entertainment News what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are to the supermarket tabloids.
The television news readers and reporters were agog most of last week about Hurricane Matthew, and one of the stars of the small screen, Shep Smith of Fox News, escaped his anchor and shared his hot flashes.
He had a map for his viewers, full of squiggly lines and arrows darting hither and yon, and implored everyone to get out of Florida before catastrophe struck. The entire Atlantic coast, from the Carolinas all the way to Denver and maybe Cheyenne, might be gone before the snow flies.
“This moves 20 miles to the west,” Shep said, pointing to a screen image of the eye of the hurricane, “and you and everyone you know are dead, all of you, because you can’t survive it. It’s not possible unless you are very, very lucky. And your kids die, too.” He even warned one viewer that if she didn’t heed his warning she shouldn’t expect him to cover her funeral.
But not just cool and reliable Shep. One of the London tabloids, big on the web, reported that some of the crazy Americans were drinking and dancing at hurricane parties, that not only the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral was threatened, but Donald Trump’s famous Mar-a-Largo mansion was, too.
The weather, like sex, is a universal preoccupation, and everyone is an expert, or thinks he is, and when the wind blows the editors at Entertainment News can’t resist the temptation to blow hard with it. This concerns the professional weathermen because when a storm doesn’t live up to the hype and the hysteria it makes it harder to persuade the public to pay attention when the real thing comes along. That’s what happened in Florida last week. Many Floridians paid no heed to Gov. Rick Scott, telling them to leave for the interior, and stayed behind for the hurricane parties.
“Coastal residents grow weary of ’false alarms’ when it comes to hurricane warnings,” says Roy Spencer, a climatologist and former scientist at NASA who conducts a popular weather blog. “But the National Weather Service has little choice when it comes to warning of severe weather events like tornadoes and hurricanes. Because of forecast uncertainty, the other option, under-warning, would inevitably lead to a catastrophic event that was not warned.”
Matthew was the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2005, major defined as Category 3, 4 or 5, with maximum sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour. The television anchors naturally imagined that after 4,001 days without a major hurricane there was an unrequited appetite for hype and hysteria.
Matthew blew and it blew, but fortunately not with the sustained wind of Shep Smith and his colleagues. Florida, at least, escaped major damage, and Cheyenne felt hardly anything at all.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.